The Tiny Baton Rouge Company Making Waves in the Mobile Gaming World

The creation of a video game often is a gradual and labor-intensive process that unfolds over months or years. But in less than two years, self-taught and solo game developer Daniel Norman has carved out a corner in the mobile gaming world, creating and releasing a series of titles that he has designed and developed largely on his own.

Norman is a co-founder and creative director of Baton Rouge-based mobile app company Red Kraken. Now working out of the Level Up Lab at the Louisiana Technology Park, he has created and released several video games while establishing partnerships to expand his reach in the hyper-competitive mobile gaming marketplace.

Following a Self-guided Path

An LSU graduate, Norman’s background is in graphic design, but he taught himself how to code while working for a consulting company over the course of several years.

“They gave me the biggest, nastiest programming projects they could find and I had to go head-first in,” he says. “It was the sink-or-swim method of programming, but I’ve always had a knack for the logical foundation behind programming languages.”

In 2016 he connected with two technology investors, with whom he would go on to found Red Kraken (Norman manages the day-to-day operations of the company). Together they set out to create a news aggregator app, which they released later that year just as major tech companies were releasing similar products. When the news app failed to catch fire, the company decided to pivot to gaming.

“We went into mobile games just to see what we could do with it,” he says.